By Nury Vittachi

Wednesday, 31 October 2012

Fame at last

OUR LITTLE PIC created and posted in a few minutes yesterday made it to the top row of Google news search list this morning. YAY US!

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WHAT THIS SHOWS is that you don’t need to achieve greatness to grab your 15 minutes of fame. Zaniness is a better route. Good examples here:

a man wearing a horse head mask and jogging during the storm in the US got international coverage on the news. And so did several people who photobombed news reporters, including one group doing gangnam style moves. Here’s a compilation:

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BUT IF YOU WILL forgive me, I will make one serious note today.

It’s this: I also want to tell you about killer storms causing death and disaster this week. BUT NOT IN AMERICA.

The newspapers, the TV news and internet sources are packed with wall-to-wall coverage of Hurricane Sandy.

But it is hard to find a single reference to Tropical Storm Gaemi which just destroyed thousands of homes and killed dozens of people in Bangladesh.

Or deadly Cyclonic Storm Nilam which closed 100s of schools in Sri Lanka this week.

Or extreme weather anywhere in Asia.

(Cyclone Nilam)

This just confirms what I have been saying for years. In the news business, one white life is worth between 60 and 90 brown/ yellow/ black lives. Doesn’t anyone else in the news business find this a bit odd?

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GOOD TO SEE that the world of twitter generated some storm humor too, with some people deliberately ignoring the storm, and others sharing inane first world problems caused by the weather…

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DID YOU GET wet this morning? I got soaked yesterday and today on the way to work, thanks to the huge storms in Asia at the moment. No, none of them made the news…

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TUNE IN to this space tomorrow for a report on a community which has just officially banned love….